I have had this model on my pile of unpainted toy soldiers for a very long time. I am pretty sure I bought him way back in 2002/3 so 10 years ago... A model this large can be quite a daunting task and I have already started painting him once and given up. But now he is firmly on my mind, I am painting him as a present for my dad.
When I first started painting him I was pretty much copying the cover photo, and failing miserable. He is wearing bright pink/orange and I really struggled with the colour. Once I stripped him I decided to try a different approach. Toosh has painted a few large scale Samurai many moons ago and has an Osprey book (or 2) detailing the arms and armour of Samurai from the 10th to the 16th Century. This model fits into that date range nicely and I flicked through the book in eager anticipation. Lo and behold, I found a pic which had obviously been used by the cover artist for Pegaso - orange and purple, fitting the exact time frame of the kit. But I had already decided to avoid that colour scheme so I started looking at other Samurai on the page.
There were some nice dark green colour schemes, but the artwork which really stood out for me was on the opposing page - an interesting mustard and duck-egg with orange silk braidwork and a really bold black and white silk cover to the do-maru (breastplate). The period is a little out, but I think I will get away with it as there are a LOT of similarities between the two.
I have spent most of my time so far studying the patterns and painting the head of the model. Getting this right is very important to me. Here are a couple of photos with his head shot against the reference page showing how I want the whole piece to look.
Talk about a challenge - lots of big firsts here... first historical piece, first large scale full figure, first samurai... Wish me luck!
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